Surfaces and Essences

  The Tyranny of Analogies

  Analogy can play an even more coercive role. Sometimes analogies not only arise naturally out of situations, as we’ve just seen, but they can then shut out all other viewpoints. In such cases, we are dealing with, so to speak, “the tyranny of analogies”.

  K.’s grandfather adored redwoods. When he was old and very ill and everyone knew the end was near, his son decided to take him for one last time to see Northern California’s beautiful Avenue of the Giants, a 31-mile stretch of road that features some of the most spectacular redwoods in the world. This was a wonderful moment for the grandfather, allowing him to spend some special moments of tender remembrance with his son, among these trees that he had always so much cherished. Not long after this trip, the old man passed away, peacefully and serenely.

  Forty years later, K’s father was himself an old man and for several years had been in declining health. He too had a lifelong love of redwood trees, and one day it occurred to K. to do for her father what he had done for his own father — to take him on a trip to the Avenue of the Giants, so that for one last time he could be close to the magnificent trees he had always adored. She dearly wanted her father once again to experience this rare grandeur, and she hoped to share it with him.

  But alas, it was not to be, and the blame lies entirely with the human faculty of analogy-making. Had K. even dared to hint that she wanted to take her father to see the redwoods, the analogy with his trip with his father would have instantly leapt to the mind of everyone in the family, and most of all to K.’s father himself, of course. K.’s suggestion would have meant, pretty much explicitly: “Dad, soon you’re going to die, and I dearly want to take this last trip with you before you do.” In other words, taking this trip would have been an unmistakable message from K. to her father, telling him that his family saw him at death’s door. “Better not go there!”, K. said to herself, inadvertently making a double entendre.

  This intergenerational analogy has great power, because the fact that it would instantly spring to everyone’s mind totally blocked K. from doing something that her father would have loved to do and that she herself thought would be a beautiful gesture. And yet there is no causal power linking one trip to the other. There is no reason for a sane person to believe that taking one’s father on a trip to see huge redwood trees will bring about the latter’s death in short order. “The Curse of the Avenue of the Giants” might be a good title for a murder mystery, but it should nonetheless not have inspired great fear in K.’s father or in any other member of the family.

  Though not grounded in logic, this analogy constitutes a greater pressure than could emerge from any kind of formal deductive reasoning. Everyone knows that if A implies B and B implies C, then A implies C, and yet such reasoning patterns don’t exert great psychological force on us. We know that there are often hidden traps in what appear to be valid modes of reasoning. The way that the redwood-tree analogy, which has no logical power, takes over our minds willy-nilly forms a stark contrast with the way that we react to formal reasoning.

  If one day we were to read that the proof of some famous theorem — say that of Fermat’s Last Theorem, discovered toward the end of the twentieth century — had been shown to have flaws in it, we would not keep on believing in its validity. We have all heard arguments that sound logical and rational but that lead to conclusions that are blatantly false, and so we have learned that sometimes it pays to be prudent when faced with scientific-sounding reasoning, even when it sounds ironclad. In contrast, in the case of K.’s analogy, we are overwhelmed by the stark power of the resemblance; it is so strong that the conclusion is irresistible. In short, it is easier to be suspicious of a logical argument than of an argument by analogy.

  The analogy between the two trips to the redwoods, though it lacks any basis in logic, and though its conclusion may well be totally false, is so blatant that it cannot be shrugged off. Without in the least believing in any kind of “paranormal analogical force” that will kill her father, K. feels completely trapped, because she, like any other human being, is incapable of suppressing the heavy pall that the analogy would cast over such a trip. Even if K. and her whole family had a long talk about it, and everyone, including her father, were in total agreement that it was just an analogy with no meaning, there would still remain in everyone’s mind the salient vision of the sword of Damocles that the analogy would have brought into existence, which would be the thought, “Suggesting this trip to Dad inevitably says to Dad that we all think his days are numbered.” Indeed, a long family conversation about it all would only strengthen and entrench the analogy’s grip on everyone’s mind.

  The two trips, so far apart in time and yet so similar in the minds of all involved, cannot psychologically be pulled apart. The mapping is so salient that the human mind concludes that the two stories have to end identically. It’s a classic case of the proverb “One does not speak of rope in the house of someone who was hanged.” No one would believe that taking the trip would actually bring about the father’s death; it is simply that the idea of taking the trip would inevitably be contaminated by the image of that other trip one generation earlier, and the analogy would impose itself heavily and sadly.

  Human thought simply is this way. Certainties do not come from following rigid deductive laws; indeed, conclusions reached through such reasoning strike many people as suspect for that very reason. By contrast, categorizations brought about by analogy-making impose their conclusions in a manner that is hard to resist. If it’s a dog, then it ought to bark. If’s it’s a chair, then one ought to be able to sit on it. If it’s night, it’s hard to see. If I suggest the trip, then Dad will think that we all think he’s at death’s door. This particular case has shown that analogies can make up our minds for us in a very firm fashion. Just as we cannot help thinking “four legs” when we think “table”, or “feathers” when we think “bird”, or “genius” when we think “Einstein”, so K. and her family wouldn’t have been able to resist thinking “imminent death of Dad” if they were to think “a trip for Dad so that he can savor, one last time, the Avenue of the Giants”.

  A Double-edged Analogy

  At this juncture in our book, another analogy in the same vein imposes itself on us. It begins when Chilean physicist Francisco Claro, accompanied by his wife Isabel and their three children, set out from their native land for Indiana University in Bloomington, where they were going to spend Francisco’s first sabbatical year ever. This couple was among the best friends of the American couple, Doug and Carol.

  Many similarities linked these two couples. Doug and Francisco were just a couple of years apart in age, and both had gotten their doctorates in physics working under the same professor at the same university; both adored Bach and Chopin and played piano frequently for each other. As for Carol and Isabel, they were good friends, both had gotten degrees in librarianship and had worked as librarians, and each of them had a kind of soft Latin beauty.

  Several months after Francisco’s arrival at Indiana University, Isabel started having a series of agonizing headaches. After being taken to Bloomington Hospital, she was diagnosed as having a brain tumor, and was instantly transferred to a much more sophisticated hospital in Indianapolis, about sixty miles to the north, for further tests and procedures. The tumor was found to be very large, and indeed, before operating, the surgeon described it to Francisco and Isabel as “the size of a lemon”. Never in their lives had they known such a terrible fear as at that moment. And yet, in the course of the operation on Isabel, which was necessary to forestall her death, it was discovered that the tumor was benign, and not only that: it was encapsulated and was thus able to be removed very naturally. Isabel recovered quickly from the surgery, and there were no lasting consequences.

  Seventeen years after this event, Doug left his native land with his wife Carol and their two children to spend their first-ever sabbatical year in the university town of Trento, Italy. After a few marvelous months t
here, Carol started having a series of excruciating headaches. Doug took her to the hospital in Trento, where they did tests and discovered a brain tumor. She was instantly transferred by ambulance to the much more fully equipped hospital of Verona, some sixty miles to the south, for more extensive testing and procedures. The tumor was found to be very large, and indeed, before operating, the surgeon described it to Doug and Carol as “the size of a lemon”. Never in their lives had they known such a terrible fear as at that moment.

  The analogy between these two situations is incredibly strong, so strong that readers might think it is all just an invention, but it is all true down to the finest detail. In each case, we are in the presence of a young family during their first sabbatical year ever, undertaken in a foreign country; these families are analogous for the reasons given above, and the strength of their friendship lends great strength to the analogy. In both situations, a tumor is detected in the brain of the wife after a series of terrible headaches; in both cases, the patient is instantly transferred from the local hospital to a much better equipped hospital in the nearest large city, roughly sixty miles away; in both cases, the tumor, once measured, is described as being “lemon-sized”.

  Now given the strength of this analogy so far, no one could hear it and not be at least tempted to conclude that “history was inevitably going to repeat itself” in the case of the two couples — that is to say, that Carol’s tumor, like Isabel’s, would be found to be benign and encapsulated and would be removed perfectly, with no consequences, and that everything would be fine afterwards. Indeed, for Doug and Carol, this belief was more than just tempting — it was enormously powerful, and it allowed them to face this horrifying situation and even to feel optimistic, as if this whole story was simply one part of the parallel unfolding of the two couples’ lives, and thus was inevitably bound to have a similar ending. And although all this turned out to be wrong, Doug and Carol were sustained until nearly the very end by this compelling analogy.

  The Prison of the Known

  We are constantly confronted with the new and the unfamiliar, and we deal with it through the help of myriads of analogies. Those same analogies, however, manipulate us, turning us into prisoners of the familiar. The Indian thinker Jiddu Krishnamurti wrote a great deal about how the memory of our past shackles us as we grapple with the present. In his writings, he vaunts the idea of acquiring new perspectives that are not shackled by our memory, for in his view the chains of memory do not allow a pure, true, genuine, and deep perception of oneself, of others, of one’s environment, or of situations that one encounters (“That memory is knowledge, that knowledge is going to interfere… — obviously.”). “Freedom from the Known”, the title of one of his most famous works, clearly expresses this viewpoint.

  As we have just seen, there are nearly invisible analogies that crop up in the tiniest acts of cognition and there are large analogies that, by staring us in the face, force us to take decisive forks in our lives; moreover, our categories, selectively activated by our momentary concerns and our momentary obsessions, filter our perception of our surroundings and control our thoughts. In fact, it is the known that manipulates us at all times and in all ways. We depend intimately on the known, on both very small and very large scales. And thus there can be no doubt that looking at the world in terms of one’s past experiences is an undeniable fact of human existence. Yes, as Krishnamurti says, we all are shackled by the blinders of our categories; indeed, they follow us like shadows, acting as indispensable collaborators of our sensory organs and as inseparable partners in our perceptions. In this sense, analogies manipulate us and control us shamelessly, boldly inserting themselves left and right between us and what surrounds us, and even between ourselves and our selves.

  Analogy pervades our thoughts from top to bottom, controlling every aspect of our interactions with the world. The fact that it controls us so intimately leads to the inexorable conclusion that we can think only in terms of what we know in some fashion or other. We are like blind people who have always lived among other blind people, unable to imagine the existence of senses beyond touch, smell, hearing, and taste. Even the most daring ideas of science-fiction authors and the wildest visions of surrealistic painters come from combining commonplace concepts from our everyday world; thus, such creators dream up such notions as a flying three-headed lion, or an intelligent lake, or a machine that can reverse the direction of time’s flow, or an invisible person, or a cross between a human and a spider, or a person who can see into the future, or a new kind of force between particles that creates fabulous amounts of energy, and so on. The book Codex Seraphinianus is an illustrated encyclopedia several hundred pages long that portrays a fictitious world in enormous detail, a world that in nearly every way diverges from our own, but which, at the same time, is constructed entirely from conceptual building blocks that are completely mundane. Even when people reach such high peaks of creativity, they do so totally through their conceptual repertoire that comes from their mundane existence.

  Each of us is continually creating extensions of or variations on what we already know, and at the base of this huge edifice lie our most primitive needs. And our constant quest to meet these primitive needs leads us to undertake activities having seemingly unlimited levels of sophistication. The need for food gave rise to haute cuisine; the need for warmth gave rise to high fashion; the need for shelter gave rise to architecture; the need to move about gave rise to vehicles of innumerable sorts; the need to mate gave rise to erotic art and innumerable love songs and poems; the need to reproduce gave rise to families and their interactions; the need to exchange goods gave rise to huge networks of interdependent economies; the need to cooperate gave rise to governments; the need to understand the world gave rise to science; the need to communicate gave rise to a thousand constantly-evolving technologies… We humans have created an unlimited cornucopia of elaborate variations on the themes of what we know, but we are incapable of going beyond that.

  What, then, is this goal of “freeing oneself from the known”? The known has two closely linked facets: it is a constraint, in that it biases our perceptions through the filters it imposes, but it is also a guide, in that it offers us the possibility of constantly changing points of view. Like railroad tracks, which give a train the ability to move great distances but also force it to follow the linear path they define, our categories allow us to say and predict a vast variety of things, but since in each case we adopt only one particular point of view, all other points of view are temporarily suppressed.

  Stripped of all past experiences, a human being would be incapable of seeing, distinguishing, or understanding anything at all. Seeing the known as an obstacle to human thinking is like seeing tracks as an obstacle to a train’s motion. While this is true in one sense, since tracks keep trains from wandering all over creation, it is quite absurd in another sense, since trackless trains would go nowhere at all. Likewise, seeing analogy as a manipulative force is correct in one sense, because we are all relentlessly pushed around by our analogies, but it’s absurd in another sense, because without analogies no thinking would be possible at all.

  Of course, a seven-year-old girl who is delighted with her brand-new revelation that “shaving cream is like toothpaste” is a prisoner of her prior knowledge: her category of toothpaste necessarily biases her perception of her father’s shaving cream. But this “prison” has to be contrasted with the “freedom” that she would enjoy if she had no knowledge of the concept toothpaste — or of the concept white, or of the concept cream, or of the concept substance, and so forth.

  No one can deny that our knowledge of the world constitutes an extremely tight set of constraints, but it is precisely this set of constraints that imbues our thoughts with their marvelous novelty and freshness. This brings to mind the final four lines of a graceful little ode written by James Falen, a gifted translator of Alexander Pushkin, the great Russian poet whose poetry features constraints of all sorts:

  T
here are magic links and chains

  Forged to loose our rigid brains.

  Structures, strictures, though they bind,

  Strangely liberate the mind.

  Hoping to get rid of one’s categories acquired through experience would be like wishing to jump right into the most advanced stages of Alzheimer’s disease. We humans have the great luxury of being able to look at our world through all sorts of filters — all manner of categories — but a virgin perception, untainted by any prior concepts, is a chimera. The known, as it is an intrinsic extension to our physiological senses, is part and parcel of our perception. To summarize matters pithily, if, in making one’s way in the world, one were offered the choice between having a backlog of known things to depend on or having nothing known to depend on, it would not be tantamount to a choice between living in chains and living free as a bird, but rather, to a choice between living in a complex maze pervaded by patterns or living in perpetual blindness.